Traffic jams on land and water and no desire to sit in a hole drinking Chardonnay
1 f you stand on the shore near the Barrenjoey lighthouse to the north of the great Sydney conurbation and look out to sea you will observe, on the horizon, ships queueing in line. They are waiting to enter the port of Newcastle, a hundred or more miles away. There they will load up with coal to feed the voracious economies of India and China.
The waiting ships symbolise the Australian predicament. The country is a principal source of raw materials for the emerging giants of Asia but it is struggling to deliver the goods. Cheap coal and various ores lie under the soil in abundance, but the demands are too great for the infrastructure.
Sydney these days is incontestably a great city. In the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge it boasts two of the world's most iconic structures; it has a sky-scraping downtown profile, intermittent traffic gridlock and 101 ways with coffee. Yet offshore lies that long line of ships waiting to collect coals from Newcastle, a constant reminder of the precariousness of the city's contemporary affluence.
During violent storms a month or so ago, one ship ran aground on a Newcastle beach after jettisoning her liquid ballast and losing control in the dangerous swell. She was eventually pulled ignominiously off the beach — but the episode drew attention to the muddle on Sydney's horizon. The resources are there, and in demand, but the basic fact remains that the distribution and delivery systems are outmoded. The ships on the horizon look pretty by day and twinkle disarmingly at night. But they are alarming symbols.
On a more human level the problem is similar. Sydney has no underground system. The trains are unreliable and Central Station is a nightmare; cab-drivers often speak no known language and seem not to know where anywhere is; buses swirl past stops during rush hours because they're full, and some of their drivers enjoy high-speed duels with each other. The only reliable form of transport appears to be on the water, where every conceivable shape and style of ferry sallies forth from the wharves at Circular Quay. Even that is far from perfect. The Parramatta ferry was cancelled the other day when unseasonal rains overflowed a crucial weir. It made a change from leaves on the line or the wrong sort of snow back home, but it did nothing to change my view of a huge sprawling city which is inadequately joined up.
The preferred form of travel for those venturing out of town is by air — as anyone visiting the Italian-dominated suburb of Leichhardt can testify. Leichhardt is on the flight path not far from the airport and every few seconds a big jet thunders overhead, more often than not bearing the distinctive flying kangaroo of the national carrier Qantas — the second oldest airline in the world. Qantas seems to be going well. It is certainly a pleasure to fly on and it has just announced healthy profits along with the acquisition of a new chief executive poached from the mining industry. Part of this success is attributed to a cut-price arm of the airline which has been happily fighting it out with a Bransonowned Oz cheapo called Virgin Blue.
The other day, however, Qantas came up with a new logo. The kangaroo remains but it has changed shape. I can't work out whether this is just because of the whimsicality of some creative thinking in the ad agency or, more plausibly, because the old stubby kangaroo won't fit the sleek lines of the next generation of aircraft. In any event the new look is going to be expensive and conservative Australian travellers are unhappy with the change.
St John's College, where I'm spending a half-semester, is an imposing Victorian Gothic complex in an otherwise grotty part of town. My wife and I are living in the old gatehouse on the busy Pan-amatta Road opposite what appears to be a groovy house of ill-repute and near to more dealers in white wedding dresses than even Barbara Cartland could have imagined. The College and the university feel, to me, ill at ease with their environs. One honorary fellow of St John's, the columnist Miranda Devine, wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald the other day bemoaning the absence of a 'grown-up social life' in the city. Melbourne, the great rival, has different licensing laws which have encouraged a host of chic, small bars unlike Sydney's trademark pubs. Devine thought this was one reason Robert de Niro decided to open his latest Nobu restaurant there. Melbourne is more `Manhattanesque'.
When Sydney's Lord Mayor, Clover Moore, suggested a change in the licensing law to assist those who wanted to establish trendy wine bars, she was shouted down by the evidently powerful boss of the Australian Hotels Association, who bawled — in a line destined, I think, to go into the Old Possum Book of Outmoded Australian Aphorisms — 'We don't want to sit in a hole and drink Chardonnay and read a book. That's not what Sydney wants.'
T 've always been told to look above the 1 sight-line when assessing a place. It is true that the upper stories of Sydney's old colonial buildings are often at charming variance with the garish shop-fronts below. Like other cities with a host of new office blocks, however, the upper skyline is like a business almanack of neon signs, advertising Canon, Samsung and Ernst and Young alongside hotels such as the Shangri-La and the Intercontinental. One relatively unobtrusive newcomer in this sky-scraping lexicon is Macquarie Bank. Its building at Martin Place is relatively modest but it is the smartest and most innovative outfit in Sydney. Earlier this year it announced record profits of A$1.4 billion and it pays the nation's highest salaries and bonuses to its 10,000 employees. It opened in 1969 as the Australian outpost of the London merchant bank Hill Samuel but now, under its all-Oz name, it owns airports, toll-roads, tunnels and car parks all over the world. It does infrastructure, and as the writer Gideon Haigh points out, it has managed, improbably, to make the word sexy. As I consider the queue of colliers waiting to get into Newcastle or the antediluvian horrors of Sydney Central Station, the idea of sexy infrastructure seems peculiarly ironic.
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